Hello,

I am trying to have fun with tape drive. But still no joy with the colorado 350 ...

It's a DOS/Windows 3.11 era and has a 34 pin floppy interface, so that would even pre-dates the IDE tape drives. It appears to be a 420 MB capacity QIC drive. This tape drive (the internal model) daisy chains off of the floppy drive controller, and is not very fast. Also, even with compression, you'd be hard pressed to even backup a typical Windows XP installation.

I have the 34 pin ribbon cable that has an extra connector on it enabling it to run along with the two existing floppy drives.

But bios (from a msi ms-6373 K7N420 with win98) will give me a floppy error at startup. This bios is still able to handle two floppy drives, but is it not too new for the colorado ? Or is it a dead colorado 350 ?

A few links I found :
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/need-hel … -drive.2092423/
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?519 … -quot-connector
and the drivers I guess :
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~bluegeni/co … oltape/main.htm
It's supposed to work in Linux, using the "ftape" driver.

It is said that QIC drives are notorious for loosing alignment so that you can't read any tape you wrote on one drive on another, and even worse, not read any tape you wrote a few months ago on the same drive. Not a good idea. They work OK for regular rotating backup but are a terrible idea for archival storage and using old tapes.
My goal is to be able to play with it but not use it for anything important.

Would anyone have any experience with these colorado 350 drives ?

Thanks in advance.